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deehollowaywrites · 5 years

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Title: Doomed to Fail: The Incredibly Loud History of Doom, Sludge, and Post-Metal

Author: J.J. Anselmi

Release: February 11, 2020

Genre: music, nonfiction, memoir

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When I first heard Metallica’s “Battery,” I knew I’d found the real shit, J.J. Anselmi’s newest states in an early chapter. The social alienation, the depression, the anger, and the preoccupation with death: it was the music I needed, right when I needed it. Similar stories abound in volumes like Jon Wiederhorn’s Raising Hell and a recent academic anthology of gender, sexuality, and heavy metal analyses; the typical pathway to extreme music, it seems, is youthful aggression, disaffection, or malaise. It’s not very cool to recall that your teen rage was tempered rather than catalyzed by religion. Even less cool to admit that if you are currently swimming in doom’s murk, you only took the chilly plunge because of boys and men.

A few antecedents, then: The Minutemen. Captain Beefheart. Def Leppard. The Mars Volta.

Edgy enough, weird enough, almost metallic enough, nearly harsh enough. It’s easy to see the slippery slope, to hear my mother’s voice in my head. If that’s what you want to spend your money on, she said of The Mars Volta’s full-length debut, I guess it’s your money. A year or so later, she would be interrogating me about certain media downloads to the family desktop--not because I was infringing copyright via poorly-labeled LimeWire files, but because the music was the sort that drove away the Holy Spirit (to be fair, Master of Puppets didn’t inspire any epiphanies). Mormons are very concerned with the Spirit’s presence. Movies and music are the fastest and most seductive shortcuts to becoming lost in a mire of worldliness, spiritual miasma, and sin. Interestingly, my mother was less perturbed by my weekly emails to a much-older dude I’d “met” on a geek forum, he of the curly beard and Captain Beefheart appreciation. For a suburban teenage girl reading SPIN in 2003, music in particular seemed a clear Point A to ineffable cool’s Point B, as evidenced by--although at the time I wouldn’t have phrased it thus--fuckability. Whiteboy music journalists, from Klosterman with his contrarian hair metal love to Azerrad deifying The Minutemen, had Ideas about what made rock music good. It was a trail of breadcrumbs that could be followed by anyone, so maybe I’d start off as me and end up as Brody Dalle. Of course, wanting to be punk is proof that you're destined to remain square, so the guy in the homemade Leftöver Crack t-shirt likewise stayed a mystery. Meanwhile, I made a fansite about The Mars Volta for my web design class, wrote an AP essay about why filesharing is good, actually, and counted the days ‘til graduation.

Euro-style power metal is romantic. Good make-out tunes. The fine art of getting into something that someone you fancy is into, well, that’s bog-standard for a huge swath of humanity and I’ve never been above it because I do like exploring new things. However, there’s a certain flavor of man who encourages women to listen to music he likes not out of genuine enthusiasm and desire to share, but because filling up a vessel with water from your spring means that you, yourself, will never be thirsty. There’s no rearranging of boundaries necessary for the recommender, no exchange of gifts, no call to reassess your favorites in light of new information. Where things get hairy is when women take what is conferred and make it their own. The vaguely fringe music that had already primed my eardrums led away from flourish-laden prog and high-camp power metal, into weirder and uglier places my boyfriend at the time had no interest in traversing. It stings a bit to realize that your heart is big enough to hold all the loves that comprise the person you love, that your desire is malleable and open, and that they have always been enough by themselves, fully-formed, unswerving as a highway through the desert. It hurts to hear that you’re not doing the thing (metal or comics or horse racing) in the way that was shown you, properly. This might be when the rage starts to seep back in, poisoning the spring. But solo concert-going is only lonely until you make it past the venue’s threshold. After that, the Spirit is always with you.

Myself, I’ve seldom found the divine in places it was supposed to inhabit.

The thing about The Mars Volta that embedded itself in my ribcage seventeen years ago wasn’t their tight jeans: it was how they seemed to have misplaced all their fucks. Prior to Sacha Jenkins’ 2003 SPIN review, the ugliest thing I’d sought out of my own volition was an Anti-Flag album, a suitably edgy move in George W. Bush’s America. Deloused in the Comatorium did not care if you understood what it was going for; an impetus existed behind the unexpected time signatures, dog-bothering vocals, and salsa moves that was alluring in its opacity and bloody-mindedness. A bunch of weirdos recorded a fuck-you in album format because they wanted to. Atmosphere, emotion, tension could all be far more important to a song than melody or lyrics. Listenable was up for debate. Art formed its own excuse. In this way, although the two groups couldn’t be further apart sonically, my heart was made ready for Katatonia. Then Oceans of Slumber. Torche. Black Castle, Thou, Bell Witch, Cult of Luna, on and on, an endless sinkhole opening up.

A great and appealing contrast of doom metal lies in the apparent dumbassery of its sound. This is broadly true of all metal, of course; Coal Chamber or Megadeth, Black Sabbath or Pantera, metal was music for drop-outs, stoners, school shooters… the purview not only of miscreants, but of boys and stupid boys at that. Punk seemed the smarter option, if you had anger issues, had heard of feminism, or tended toward hobbies like trying to form a Young Democratic Socialists chapter at your school. For older me, trying to rewrite a religious mind into a liberal and cosmopolitan one, prog metal was defensibly slick and impressive, while power metal seemed less openly hateful toward women. All the while, doom lurked beneath layers of nay-saying. Adult men I’ve known, talented guitarists with good ears and smart hands, have sneered at all the seeming lack populating the slower subgenres--lack of beauty, skill, or even aggression in its most recognizable and masculine forms. Yet, for a listener whose favorite pastime is intellectualizing everything in sight, doom is the other side of the sun.

I don’t… really… understand what a tritone is. I know it’s important, and I could do a bad approximation of the opening of “Black Sabbath,” but definitionally I’m at a loss. Often I have no idea which instrument is making the sound that I like. I don’t know anything about music theory or how to talk with authority about what makes music good, important, or even what differentiates music from other sounds. Maybe a drone metal track is a collection of sounds, rather than a song? My Dream Theater-enthusiast ex figured since I was a nebbishy bespectacled geek, prog would be all I needed. The thinking man’s metal! No one has ever felt threatened by Steven Wilson. You can remain Smart™ while listening to assorted finger-wanky Europeans. In contrast, kicking it with a Texas weed-cult at the skatepark is stupid. Obviously, every genre of metal contains its geniuses, and one of doom’s most lovable qualities is how often unquestionable finesse arrives wrapped in brutal, bizarre, counterintuitive paper. But beyond the plausible deniability of technique and philosophy found in groups like Neurosis is something even more compelling. Sometimes, it just fucking sounds cool.

It sounds like that because someone did it intentionally, gleefully. I wrote a novel like that because I liked how it looked, sounded, felt.

One of the birthrights of normative (white, cis, straight, abled) masculinity is feeling. If you turn out queer, or are socialized as female, or live with the massed connotations of a racist culture written over your skin, overt and violent emotion may be anathema. The power of accessing a fully human emotional spectrum for the first time should not be underrated. The doom bands I grew into loving, independent of the people closest to me who putatively liked similar music, are into feelings. Even, or maybe especially, the ones authority figures wish you didn’t have (and those aren’t always the bad ones. Authority hates it even more if you feel good). If there’s a thing Mormons don’t countenance, it’s feeling bad things and informing people of them, or feeling the wrong good things. Doubt is a big no-no. It’s always better to feel shame when possible. If the Spirit isn’t telling you what you know it should, it’s on you for not listening enough, praying enough, being enough. If the Spirit’s voice isn’t soft and gentle, if it instead materializes in the best growl this side of Obituary, well, Satan quotes scripture too. Meanwhile, doubt--lack of clarity, spiritual and emotional murkiness, bone-deep ambivalence--is doom’s molten heart. Meanwhile, shame--at the self’s fondled hatreds, as C.S. Lewis has it, for things desired and things questioned--is shunned by doomsayers.

The body experiences advance warning. Fury, fear, arousal. Sure, I attribute my openness toward weird music to frustrated teen lust. Sure, I owe Roy Khan and Tony Kakko for first love and redrawn horizons. When fire dies, what’s left is not absence but ash, fertile and generative. Doomed to Fail recognizes that continual plumbing and revolving in uncertainty for its beauty and possibility. Whatever formed my rage and love, those two sides of the same forbidden coin, they belong to me now.

#Doomed to Fail #J.J. Anselmi #diana reads

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londontheatre · 7 years

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Izuka Hoyle and Julia McKenzie

How does it take more than three hours to present five awards? Have twelve finalists sing two songs each, which itself justifies an interval, and ask a judging panel to decide who wins what while the audience is treated to yet more musical theatre performances. But that only takes care of three awards, in the cumbersomely titled ‘Stephen Sondheim Society & Mercury Musical Developments Student Performer of the Year 2017 & Stiles + Drewe Prize’. This should really read ‘Stiles + Drewe Prizes’ (plural), as there are now two, one for composition, the other for potential, namely Best New Song and the Mentorship Award. These two awards are judged separately from the live competition.

I’m not entirely sure why, but this year’s offerings saw performances, for the most part, rather hammed up than might normally be expected from performances of Sondheim’s material, which has a tendency to be nuanced and melodic. The opening ensemble number set up what was to follow very well, an almost painfully slow rendering of ‘Putting It Together’ from Sunday in the Park with George, though done this way, it did allow for ‘every word, every line’ (to quote the song itself) to be clearly enunciated.

These are, one has to accept, students still, and the nerves can sometimes be quite telling. As ever with a competition of this nature, taking on a lesser known tune can work to a finalist’s advantage, though this cultured audience knew to suspend disbelief and not think of the various other productions and concerts in which they would have heard, for instance, ‘Losing My Mind’ from Follies.

It is to Verity Blyth’s performance of ‘Losing My Mind’ I turn to first. As host Clive Rowe pointed out, there were ‘technical things’ that happened, namely that someone else’s microphone was turned on, so that the entire Noel Coward Theatre momentarily heard one side of a conversation. The mark of a great performer, Rowe continued, is to carry on when something like that happens, as though it never did. It is indeed a hallmark of professionalism, and Blyth’s performance is itself worthy of mention in any case, being one of the few that didn’t attempt to act out every line. There was a poise and confidence even in a music break.

Of course, sometimes a role calls for an all-out performance. Joseph Wiltshire-Smith rose to the occasion in ‘Buddy’s Blues’, also from Follies, the only finalist to make full use of the stage space available. To quote a poster outside the theatre for Half A Sixpence, the current resident show at the Noel Coward, it sent “the audience into raptures”.

The new songs featured increased my confidence in new British musical theatre. It has, generally speaking, taken a different path from the glitz and glamour of the Broadway musical. Most of the offerings here are a stand and deliver approach, where it is not possible to say much about the choreography because there isn’t any choreography to say much about. But these ones are intriguing, drawing the audience into the narrative even as stand-alone songs. Georgia Frost’s performance of ‘Gerry and Me’ by Tom Lees and Claire Rivers was an example of a tune heavy on plot and full of pathos, as far away from the traditional song and dance as possible but nonetheless as worthy winner of the Stiles + Drewe Best New Song 2017.

[See image gallery at http://ift.tt/1FpwFUw] Too much of a big deal was made about Tom Blackmore taking on a song originally written for a female character, in ‘What’ll It Be’ by Jim Barne and Kit Buchan. I would not have noticed if it hadn’t been pointed out repeatedly. I felt it was entirely irrelevant; it was a perfectly good performance of a perfectly good song (well done, Tom Blackmore!), and quite why it couldn’t be appreciated for what it was is something I can’t get my head around. Perhaps the panel is unaware of David Suchet playing Lady Bracknell, Glenda Jackson playing the title role in a production of King Lear, and numerous other gender-blind castings. Ironically, while they had left the auditorium to deliberate, one of the musical numbers the audience was treated to was ‘Broadway Baby’, sung by host Clive Rowe but – as you know, it was originally written for a female character. Again, so what? It was most enjoyable as it was.

I won’t attempt an analysis of all 24 songs sung by the twelve finalists (between them, that is). No meaningful explanation was given as to how the judging panel arrived at their decisions, and as all of the finalists were very good, I simply accept their decisions in good faith. Oscar Conlon-Morrey, taking the third prize of £250 kindly donated by panellist Julia McKenzie, sang ‘The Contest’ from Sweeney Todd, commanding the stage on his own in a number that has only one singing part but would ordinarily require a number of characters present on stage (it wouldn’t be much of a contest if Pirelli had no-one else to compete with). It was convincing, it took some guts, and his performance of a new song, ‘Work To Do’ by Ben Glasstone, demonstrated an ability to portray courage in that second number as effortlessly as flamboyancy in the first.

I personally thought Shaq Taylor, winner of the second prize (£500, donated jointly by David Langrish and the Sarah Thorne Theatre in Broadstairs, and the Newsome family), could have been a tad more sinister as the title character in Sweeney Todd has his ‘Epiphany’. His performance of ‘Apology to a Child’ by Tom Slade, was utterly sublime, a simultaneously smooth and soaring number.

Izuka Hoyle, winning the Student Performer first prize of £1,000 (kindly donated by Tricia Sharpe and Ray Barker) did a worthy and well-controlled rendering of ‘Last Midnight’ from Into The Woods. The new song she performed, ‘The Matchmaker’ by Claire McKenzie and Scott Gilmour, quickly established a rapport with musical director Stephen Ridley, and then with the audience (and therefore with the judges) that lasted right to the end of the number, exhibiting a beautiful vocal belt without overdoing it, just the right balance.

At the interval, somebody remarked to me that they had hoped for more softer numbers in the second half, as we had quite a few full-throated performances in the first. My fellow theatregoer did not have his wish granted, but, on balance, it is better to hear and see clearly what is being sung and performed than having to strain our ears and eyes. Such was the positivity at this encouraging event, it became difficult to ascertain who was uplifting whom: the performers were thrilled by a heartened panel and a supportive audience, while the panel and audience where inspired by the performers. That’s just how an event like this should be.

By Chris Omaweng

Student Performer of the Year 2017: Izuka Hoyle Second prize: Shaq Taylor Third prize: Oscar Conlon-Morrey Stiles + Drewe Best New Song 2017: ‘Gerry and Me’ by Tom Lees and Claire Rivers Stiles + Drewe Mentorship Award 2017: Reanimator by Ben Glasstone

The Stephen Sondheim Society and Mercury Musical Developments annual West End Gala for The Stephen Sondheim Society Student Performer of the Year and The Stiles + Drewe Prize Hosted by Clive Rowe Director: Chris Hocking Musical director: Stephen Sondheim

11th June 2017 3pm At Noёl Coward Theatre St Martin’s Lane, London, WC2N 4AU

The 12 finalists from performing arts schools around the country were selected to perform at the 2017 competition. The gala included a special performance by Olivier Award winner and guest judge Janie Dee – soon to be seen as Phyllis in Follies at the National Theatre and writer and broadcaster Edward Seckerson Chaired the Student Performer judges together with legendary Sondheim interpreter Julia McKenzie to present the prize.

Judges: Rachel Kavanaugh (Half a Sixpence and The Wind in the Willows), Simon Lee (The Sound of Music, Tell Me On A Sunday), Alex Young (SSSSPOTY 2010 winner, Carousel at ENO), Dan Gillespie Sells (The Feeling, Everyone’s Talking About Jamie) and Giles Terera (soon to star as Aaron Burr in Hamilton).

http://ift.tt/2sesoEv LondonTheatre1.com

#IFTTT #LondonTheatre1.com

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